Cover image of "The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum," a true crime masterpiece

She ran a modest haberdashery shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Fredericka Mandelbaum, an “upright widow, philanthropic synagogue-goer, [and] doting mother of four,” was also the boss of the country’s most notorious crime syndicate. And when Pinkerton detectives finally staged a raid on her premises in 1884, she had reigned for twenty-five years as one of the most infamous underworld figures in America. “[S]he presided over a multi-million-dollar criminal operation that centered on stolen luxury goods and later diversified into bank robbery.” Mrs. Mandelbaum was a “fence,” a receiver of stolen goods, and she had no peer in New York or anywhere else in the country. The accomplished nonfiction author Margalit Fox colorfully chronicles her rise and fall in her true crime masterpiece, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum.

From penniless peddler to multimillionaire crime boss

As a mature woman of fifty-nine when the Pinkertons invaded her business, Fredericka Mandelbaum was roughly six feet tall and reportedly weighed between 250 and 300 pounds. “She resembled the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain,” as Fox observes.

“Marm” Mandelbaum, a German Jewish immigrant, had arrived in New York City at the age of twenty-five in 1850. After several years in poverty selling lace door to door, she learned her trade from a master fence. Her new business flourished while the economy went into overdrive. As the Gilded Age gathered steam, New York emerged as the country’s leading center of manufacturing and trade, creating untold new wealth. By 1894, she had accumulated a fortune estimated at between half a million and a million dollars. That would be equal today to almost $200 million if compared to the average wealth in the country then. The richest of the robber barons had more. But there were few of them.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox (2024) 336 pages ★★★★★

When Mrs. Mandelbaum immigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1850, this was what life on the street looked like. Image: Tenement Museum

Organized crime, then and now

In the United States, we have come to think of organized crime as Francis Ford Coppola portrayed them in the Godfather films. But that image is deeply misleading, and always has been. Early in Gilded Age New York, the Sicilian crime families had not yet arrived in New York. The “gangs” of the era, featured in Herbert Asbury’s classic book, The Gangs of New York (1928), were largely Irish. Violent neighborhood-based gangs such as the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and Bowery Boys ruled the streets. But it is a stretch to call them “organized” in the sense that Fredericka Mandelbaum pioneered in the 1860s.

Plunder worth tens of millions of dollars

“Unlike the organized crime of the tommy-gun age, Fredericka Mandelbaum’s profession entailed little violence,” Fox notes. “She was, from the first, a specialist in property crime.” She built a massive stable of pickpockets, shoplifters, burglars, and (later) bank robbers. Mandelbaum herself trained her associates and planned some of the most ambitious heists. She bankrolled the thieves, often for months at a time. And they pulled off what were then some of the most successful robberies in the country’s history. “She was said, for instance, to have received—and resold at great profit—much of the merchandise looted amid the Chicago fire of 1871.” And when the Pinkertons finally brought down her operation in 1884, they uncovered a treasure house of jewelry, bolts of rare silk, negotiable securities, and other plunder worth tens of millions of dollars at today’s prices.

Oh, and by the way. Mrs. Mandelbaum was never convicted of any crime. When in 1884 she faced charges in court that the DA could easily make stick, she, her son, and her closest henchman fled to Canada. With no extradition treaty then in place, she lived out her the rest of her life there, still in business until the end.

A true crime masterpiece

Fox does a brilliant job setting the scene of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s operations in the fast-changing world of Gilded Age New York. As she explains, the economy was evolving at a furious pace and without any of the legal limits we’ve come to expect. The explosive growth of the cities. The shift from home manufacture to commercial production. And the growth of the new middle class, bent on consumption. All these developments helped create wealth—and opportunities for unscrupulous people to grab it. And grab they did.

Fox describes the corruption that reigned in Tammany Hall-dominated politics and the police as well as commerce and industry. And she dwells in jaw-dropping detail on the criminal law partnership that Mrs. Mandelbaum depended on to keep her protected. The picture she paints of the courtroom drama that unfolded when the DA brought her to trial is priceless. Margalit Fox has, in a word, written a true crime masterpiece.

About the author

Photo of Margalit Fox, author
Margalit Fox. Image: New York Times

Margalit Fox writes on her author website that she “retired in June 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era. . . Before joining the obituary department in 2004, she spent ten years as a staff editor at the New York Times Book Review.”

Fox was born in suburban New York City in 1961 and attended Barnard College and Stony Brook University. She earned a bachelor’s and then master’s degrees from Stony Brook and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of five nonfiction books, published from 2007 to the present day.

This is one of The best true crime books.

I’ve reviewed two outstanding earlier books by the same author:

For a look at the tycoons who represented the “other half” in the Gilded Age, see:

And I’ve reviewed four other books about crime in Gilded Age America:

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